"Calling a lyricist to a piano Stevens knows is out of tune with
the times, "Mozart, 1935" begins by directing this poet-figure to continue
nevertheless playing sound over sense ("hoo-hoo-hoo,"
"shoo-shoo-shoo," "ric-a-nic") and to "practice arpeggios"
for the purpose, apparently, of diverting the speaker"s attention from the battle
being waged nearby. But the threat is near: People have been throwing stones on the roof
from the streets outside the room in which the pianist has been instructed to take his
seat. The poem has begun, then, by suggesting itself as contributing to a diversionary
tactic, a fine looking away from trouble:

Poet, be seated at the piano.

Play the present

And yet, in its own time, this poem emerged as the one work William Rose
Benét could say "most clearly" expressed "[t]he poets attitude
toward the epoch in which he finds himself." How was such a double politics possible?
"Mozart, 1935" immediately discloses a will to counter complaints of pure
poetry, to refute that charge heard regularly from Stevenss critics, to find
"his particular celebration out of tune today" on his own if necessary;
and, in short, to meet the communist [poet and critic Willard] Maass "respect
for his magnificent rhetoric" at least halfway across from right to left. That
Stevenss poetry was all music and no ideas became the repeated refrain of some of
his Leftist critics. Even so eager a devotee of the communist lyric as T. C. Wilson , we
recall, expressed the point privately to [Marianne] Moore by insisting that Stevenss
work was too much "of the senses." Perhaps more important, the notion that the
old tyranny of form held sway over Stevens was becoming the obligatory lament of many
nonradical critics who were unaware of the extent to which the Left had already touched
them. Then there was [Louis] Untermeyer, the liberal whose entrepeneurial
anthologizing had come in for much blunt left criticism, passing on a bit of the same.
"Often enough a [Stevens] poem refuses to yield a meaning," Untermeyer wrote,
"but "Academic Discourse at Havana" and "The Idea of Order at Key
West" surrender themselves in an almost pure music."

[Filreis suggests that Stevenss poem was a reply to Isidor
Schneiders ""Portrait of a False Revolutionist" as published in The
Dynamo 1:3 (Summer 1934), 12.] The speaker now urges the pianist to be
"the voice, / Not you"  to speak indeed for others as well as himself. The
pronominally reflexive is really deftly transitive, and depression-era selfhood becomes
seen by self as object  not "be thou" but "be though / The voice"
of the people:

Be thou, be thou

The voice of angry fear,

The voice of this besieging pain.

Literalized outsiders are hurling stones at the house, and "the
streets are full of cries"  perhaps, or perhaps not, because the pure poet is
making all sound and not singing a song of social significance. In the middle of the poem
the speakers strategy is evidently to implore the pure poet to practice well the
very reverberations of his opponents. If in being merely oneself (on "be thou"
reflexivity) the artist in 1935 must adapt the voice that shouts down ones art (be
thou this voice), then must oneself bespeak ones besieger. Soon the spaker
becomes shrewder still:

Be thou that wintry sound

As of the great wind howling,

By which sorrow is released,

Dismissed, absolved

In a starry placating.

"The voice" that had seemed to oppose a Mozart for 1935 is now
fully naturalized. To the poet of pure sound, the artist who knows the sound itself and
not the treasons why the sound is heard, the streets of cries augur the confused howling
of the winter wind, a howl to be quelled by the precision and utter clarity of the stars.
Through this disembodiment of sound the speaker will finally recognize that in such
expression of anger sorrow might be diminished. So the piano playing does, after all,
smooth over the contradictions of "1935" currency on one hand and outmoded
"Mozart" on the other, absolving and placating the voices raised up by one
against the other."

In"Mozart,1935," "The snow is falling / And the streets are full of
cries." How shall the poet respond?

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.

The job to be done is not an attractive one, as Stevens indicates by nonsense syllables
whose vulgarity testifies to the miserable gulf between 1935 and the delicate sounds of
Mozart. The nonsense syllables, moreover, erect a blank wall of sound between the poet and
the real human cries in the street. To summarize those cries as "hoo-hoo-hoo"
and equate this noise with "shoo-shoo-shoo" is to postpone the human seriousness
of those cries. Notice that the noise of the present is characterized as
"envious". If the "cachinnation" (loud harsh laughter) emanates from
people who can't find work and can't feed their children, people whose "cries"
fill the streets, the adjective selected seems tellingly unsympathetic. (Notice also the
inclination to meld cries with laughter, as if from the poet's distance all human noises
sound the same. More on this point later.) The poet-pianist is estranged from the street
people, at least so long as he devotes himself to Mozart's "lucid souvenir of the
past":

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.

The poem, especially in the above stanza, provides a startling intimation of a need for
political relevance in art--startling, that is, from Stevens, who vigorously opposed
demands for such relevance in many letters and in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of
Words." The pianist is summoned to "Strike the piercing chord" of a new
music which will express the suffering of all those people whose losses have been
symbolically aggregated into "A body in rags.""

There is an urgency in the summoning of the poet-pianist to his new work, urgency
caused by the importunate quality of suffering when we cannot look away from it. We can
dodge the apprehension of severe pain in others--and most of this chapter will examine
methods for such dodging--but when it is immediately before our eyes, it produces not only
fascination but also an instinctive (at any rate, deep and prerational) sense of
imperiously required response. (In this respect the apprehension of suffering in others is
like sexual desire for another person--a second kind of importuning of the self which
generated great anxiety in Stevens. This will be the focus of chapter 2.) Admittedly our
range of responses to vivid suffering in others includes noncompassionate responses, such
as flight from the scene, passionate denial of the reality of what we have witnessed, and
even sadistic desire to prolong or intensify the suffering. But none of these is a calm,
relaxed response; my point is that severe pain undergone directly in front of a viewer
normally jolts the viewer into a sense that something must quickly be done. In
"Mozart, 1935" the stress of this sense of obligation is manifested both by the
baldness of the terms of confrontation with suffering and by the effortful didacticism
with which Stevens tries to control and cool the inflamed problem of injured others:

[Halliday quotes lines 16-24]

A different poet--one more like Thomas Hardy, or more like William Carlos Williams, or
more like Kenneth Fearing (a significant poet of social protest in the thirties)--having
turned to face the "angry fear" of people, would feel that his poem's project
must be to explore "this besieging pain" and to show forth its lineaments.
Stevens, however, is interested not in writing about the street, but in writing about the
problem of writing about the street. "Mozart, 1935" is a poem about poems that
will do the work it does not itself undertake. Stevens' earnest wish to maintain a
distance from the turmoil of others' experience is reflected by his stern insistence on
the word "thou," which is repeated four times in the two stanzas just quoted and
returns as the final word of the poem. Stevens does not want the poet to be one person
among others, a "you" among "yous." Indeed, he judges that for the
poet-pianist to perform the new work, to strike the piercing chord, it will be necessary
for him to adopt a status and a role larger and more central than mere individual
selfhood: "Be thou the voice, / Not you." Stevens requires an artist abstracted
from--and thus, we may suggest, protected from--the mess of injured egos and competing
claims out there where "the streets are full of cries." When such a distance is
preserved, a satisfactory outcome of the poet's effort to respond to those cries can be
much more readily imagined by Stevens; the poem can arrive at "a starry
placating" just five lines after "this besieging pain." The arrival can
come so soon because the poet, functioning austerely as a "thou" (not a mere
"you"), has stayed in generality, abstracting countless instances of suffering
into simple terms--a body in rags, fear, pain, cries--whose generality renders them
swiftly manageable.

But what then does Stevens' poet-pianist manage in response to the social conditions of
1935? What is a "starry placating"? Educated by other Stevens poems, we may
presume it is a spirit of acceptance, in which the people's longings are calmed, though
perhaps only provisionally and temporarily, that is, they are placated. It is acceptance
of the human lot through acceptance of the natural universe--"Merely in living as and
where we live," as Stevens puts it wistfully in the last line of "Esthétique du
Mal" (CP 326)--this acceptance to be nurtured by the supreme fictions of
poetry. "Starry" seems to mean "imaginary." We notice that this
achievement of a starry placating is not to involve any attempt to change the social
conditions that have brought others' pain to Stevens' attention. Sorrow is not to be
remedied, nor even alleviated, but "released, / Dismissed, absolved . . . " We
should wonder why suffering would need absolution--is it sinful? Has suffering come from a
spiritual failure on the part of the suffering people? The poem is elusive about this, but
it is sure that what the people need is a new way of thinking, not just food, shelter,
jobs.